The top ten free dailies
As reported yesterday, the World Association of Newspapers’ top ten list of free newspapers contained some errors. According to our data the top 10 in free newspapers (December 2007) looks as follows:
Metro UK 1,355,000
Leggo (Italy) 1,050,000
20 Minutos (Spain) 1,043,000
Qué! (Spain) 957,000
ADN (Spain) 955,000
Metro Italy 850,000
City (Italy) 850,000
Metro Spain 840,000
Metro France 749,000
Metro Canada 747,000
For May 2008 the list is already somewhat different, with Qué! moving up to the second place and a new no. 10: the new Italian free daily DNews, which claims a circulation of 800,000 - unsupported by auditing evidence however.
Concerning the total circulation of free newspapers, the differences between newspaperinnovation’s data and WAN lies not only some factual errors. There are also definition problems.
At newspaperinnovation we use the ’snapshot’ method, meaning the circulation at one point in time, for instance at the end of the year.
The alternative would be ‘average’ circulation, meaning that papers that are not published throughout the year are only counted for the months they are published. If a 500,000 copy free daily is launched in July it is counted for 250,000. In the snapshot method it would be counted in full if it would be still around at the end of December. If a paper, however, was only published the first six months, it would get 250,000 copies in the average method and none in the snapshot method.
For paid newspapers, both methods would hardly differ. But because there are quite a few closures and launches in free newspapers, both methods lead to rather different outcomes.
The snapshot method - used here - results in a circulation at the end of December 2007 of 41.5 million (in May 2008 44.1 million). The average method would lead to a circulation of 39.5 million over 2007.
WAN actually uses a method where every newspaper is counted in full over the whole year, also if it’s published for only a few months. This method might work for paid newspapers, because the number of papers is quite stable, but applied to free dailies it tends to inflate total circulation.
June 5th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Journalists are getting more and more lazy nowadays. There was recently a hoax story about a 13 year old who stole his fathers credit card and hired prostitutes to play xbox with him
June 13th, 2008 at 9:36 am
The following statement of Pete Bakker posted on his Newspaper Innovation blog Wednesday, June 4th, 2008, is wrong:
“WAN actually uses a method where every newspaper is counted in full over the whole year, also if it’s published for only a few months. This method might work for paid newspapers, because the number of papers is quite stable, but applied to free dailies it tends to inflate total circulation.”
Actually, WAN has applied ‘adjusted circulation’ of free dailies in World Press Trends 2008. It means that 2003-2007 data were adjusted for every free daily title in accordance with the following formula: Average circulation per issue divided by 12 (months) and multiplied by the number of months during which the title was actually sold or distributed.
Mr. Bakker could not know about the above fact as he did not ask us before publishing his assumption.
As for his claim about the incorrect Top 10 free dailies list presented at the congress, only the Leggo circulation (provided by FIEJ, the Italian newspaper publishers’ association) has been corrected to 1,000,000 copies in the World Press Trends 2008 book, along with all relevant data on other pages.
Tatiana Repkova
Director of Research and Information Management
World Association of Newspapers
Paris
June 30th, 2008 at 11:09 am
[...] 10 paid and free newspapers in Europe. About this top 10 there already was some discussion on this weblog. WAN corrected the figure for Leggo after that, this paper is now second instead of [...]